Lewis then proceeds to illustrate this point with several stories and examples in the remainder of the book; the most interesting one, in my opinion, was his lengthy discussion of a 15-year-old New Jersey boy named Jonathan Lebed, who had used the Internet to "promote" stocks from an AOL account in his bedroom. Over a period of roughly six months, he made a profit of some $800,000; it's worth noting that this was during a period when an awful lot of people (but not me, alas) made an awful lot of money by doing nothing more brilliant than investing in eBay or Nokia or Lucent. But the SEC was incensed that young Lebed had posted phony messages (by using the multiple "alias" identifications available on a single AOL account) to generate enthusiasm for the stocks he had picked; with great fanfare and publicity, they forced him to return "illicit gains" of some $285,000 he had thus generated ... but they were utterly silent about the fact that they let him keep nearly half a million dollars of additional profits, all of which had been accumulated from an initial investment of some $8,000.

As Lewis describes it, what's most interesting about the case is that young Lebed actually investigated many of the companies he invested in — i.e., visited their corporate headquarters, looked at their financial statements, and listened to whatever CNBC had to say about them — and believed that his activities of drumming up a lot of noise about the companies on various Internet discussion boards was no different than what the "grownups" were doing. And indeed, that is what the grownups are doing on Wall Street: they're called analysts, and they were paid millions of dollars to generate enthusiastic assessments about dot-com companies that, in many cases, had no profits and no revenues and no hope of ever generating revenues and profits. The regulations and obstacles that prevented Lebed from playing in the grown-up's game — e.g., the various oversight mechanisms of the SEC and other regulatory bodies seemed artificial, contradictory, and in many cases, hypocritical and downright bogus. So, given the power of anonymity on the Internet, he simply ignored them.

I'm not in a position to say whether Lebed really did act illegally or unethically; Lewis carefully avoids making such a value judgment, too, but he does leave a strong impression in the reader's mind that, at the very least, a double standard was involved. And he repeats that point with several more stories, vignettes, and case studies. Throughout the whole discussion, Lewis makes the point that it's not that the Internet caused these situations to occur, but rather that it enabled pent-up demands to be fulfilled. Thus, he argues that the Internet is not an evil influence that seduced an innocent New Jersey teenager into doing wicked things on Wall Street — and, in the process, seducing thousands of pure, innocent, naive adults into purchasing stocks that he was recommending. On the contrary, he argues that there has always been a pent-up demand by teenagers who want to flout a set of rules and regulations they view as arbitrary and hypocritical; and there has always been a pent-up demand on the part of adults who have come to believe (perhaps through the wicked influence of television and Hollywood culture!) that they "deserve" to get rich quick, just like all of those high-paid athletes and actors. The traditional forces of society have generally prevented those demands from being fulfilled; but the Internet has created a mechanism for putting their dreams into action.

Though Lewis doesn't discuss this point, one obvious conclusion that I draw from all of this is that the traditional forces of society — i.e., the entrenched politicians, bureaucrats, and business interests who want to protect and preserve their fortunes and their empires — will not only punish the first few rebels, but will also do whatever they can to regulate and circumscribe the revolutionary powers of a new force like the Internet. Actually, Lewis does discuss this point, but in a rather roundabout fashion: he argues that all of these activities occur on the "fringes" of society; and when society then sucks those fringe activities into its maw, the pioneers and explorers and rebels simply move further out into the fringe area, to discover the next new disruptive force.

All in all, Next: The Future Just Happened is a provocative, thought-provoking book. Whether or not you agree with its conclusions, it's well worth reading — and I highly recommend it.